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https://kotaku.com/game-modding-illegal-in-japan-punishable-by-prison-and-1831525943
Japan has banned console and game modding.
Japan has banned console and game modding.
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Discussion Japan Bans Console Modding
- Thread starter RileyXY1
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This thread invites discussion. Be respectful, but feel free to share your opinions.
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Relic members overwhelmingly tend to use Essentials for building games, but hacks and Other Games are welcome; it's not exclusive, just kinda rare around here.
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That's dumb. Say you're playing Skyrim or whatever, and because of a glitch your character is stuck on a wall or whatever and you can't fix. It's illegal to mod my savefile to unstuck my character? I'm also a "hack whatever you want as long as it's not giving you an advantage online" person because who cares what you do with your own game and console? Enjoy gaming as you see fit.
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While I imagine the law was probably purposely broad enough to cover whatever they could imagine... I'd have a hard time picturing it being used to stop that.
I thinks it is likely more about resale. The idea of selling unofficial add-on, essentially. For example, imagine buying a gameshark or action replay or whatever to get cheats on an old Pokemon game or something. Stuff like that would be what this likely targets.
People overreact a lot to stuff like this.
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Preface, I haven't seen anyone else report on this and if you think I'm about to auto-translate a bunch of foreign language legalese I have some news for you, so I don't know if that means this has just flown under everyone else's radar or kotaku is just trying to generate clickthrough. For this post I'm going to assume it means what it sounds like it means, but if you ask me anywhere else I'm probably going to assume it's a joke until proven otherwise.
So, both my old DS and 3DS have been hardmodded to let me capture video off of them, and the article just said "modding game consoles" without going into details so I'm going to assume that counts. The maker of my current 3DS one, katsukity, is actually located in japan and the American one has been off the grid for several years now, so that's mildly concerning. (Katsukity's site currently says "under construction." I don't know if that means it's under construction or that it's a euphemism for "this is a really bad time to be promoting ourselves.")
By the way, if anyone's got electrical engineering experience and knows how the innards of 3DSes and Vitas work, I think there's an opening in the market for you.
I'm pretty sure this is supposed be Japan's take on sopa: a poorly-defined attempt at a one-size-fits-all to intellectual property theft that's going to do an awful lot of collateral damage.
It sounds like this would fall into the same boat as things like let's plays did about five years ago: the publishers (or I guess whatever the body governing IP in japan is) could tell you to stop, but it'd be a complete and total waste of their resources ("everyone does it") and probably drum up an awful lot of bad PR, so they probably won't.
So, both my old DS and 3DS have been hardmodded to let me capture video off of them, and the article just said "modding game consoles" without going into details so I'm going to assume that counts. The maker of my current 3DS one, katsukity, is actually located in japan and the American one has been off the grid for several years now, so that's mildly concerning. (Katsukity's site currently says "under construction." I don't know if that means it's under construction or that it's a euphemism for "this is a really bad time to be promoting ourselves.")
By the way, if anyone's got electrical engineering experience and knows how the innards of 3DSes and Vitas work, I think there's an opening in the market for you.
I'm pretty sure this is supposed be Japan's take on sopa: a poorly-defined attempt at a one-size-fits-all to intellectual property theft that's going to do an awful lot of collateral damage.
It sounds like this would fall into the same boat as things like let's plays did about five years ago: the publishers (or I guess whatever the body governing IP in japan is) could tell you to stop, but it'd be a complete and total waste of their resources ("everyone does it") and probably drum up an awful lot of bad PR, so they probably won't.